Counting up.
One year navigating my freedom voice
It was around this time last year I decided to do away with social media. Digital input is hostile and angry. People do not engage with me like that in person. Why should I keep such a violent influence in my sphere? Jading my own human experience. The delete process wasn’t complete until late January.
I found Substack several months later. In the spring when I realized I still crave sharing. It looked like an unassuming spot to plop down my musings and maybe connect with other creators. Maybe, somebody facing imminent homelessness could snag a technique from the vagabond experiment.
It was also around this time last year the VA sent the notice they were cutting off Mosco’s VA benefits. Merry Christmas! This would eventually result in homelessness and other consequences for his dependents. I did not beg anyone for relief. Instead, I had a several-month menty-b (mental breakdown). I concluded, we would prepare to do homelessness well. I’ve met folks who do!
After a few letters and many more appointments “they” reworked his VA disability ratings and turned his benefits back on this month. Like magic – not without the sort of damage to the Capitalism consumer score that will prevent us from repairing the leaking roof. We had a plan for an equity loan to make essential repairs next year. Fuck this system.
I guess we’ll just tarp it? Go online and beg for a roof as two other families facing homelessness move in? Precisely ZERO of the veterans organizations I contacted returned my call/email, or offered any resources for any of these dilemmas. They’re a fucking joke. Do not donate to them. Just hand a vet the cash. Those nonprofits are out to pay their own mortgages, not house veterans. For real.
The first of three phones died in June. I was in Arkansas along the Buffalo River. Three other devices have since croaked. Have you ever felt like some cosmic force is telling you a thing? Like, hey bitch – you don’t need a phone either. And I don’t! I get everywhere and do things just fine without one.
People tell me I’m brave! Ha! Nah. It’s more of a Gumpian philosophy: just floating around all accidental like. There was one elderly woman and her husband driving on a gravel road in a northern Minnesota forest. Some bums and I were out for a walk. In a city context, this woman would have been too scared to ask us for directions. Instead, she called us brave for tent camping out there with wolves. I’ll take wolves over meanspirited people all day every day!
It has been the journey of a lifetime! Roaming National Forests, eating from small town dumpsters, trading labor (like cleaning a bathroom) to get into a tourist thing, or music festival. I have seen so many humans bumping into each other. In person. Loving one another where they are on their unique path laden with its own traps and obstacles.
My advice to you as you see the world through a terrifying digital filter of people who constantly project violence at you: leave your house. Even at protests with red-hats extending the finger, I have felt the love of hundreds of hearts bothered by all THIS. Chaos, competition, contrived conflict.
As I keep posting into the void, free from feedback and interaction. Without praise nor criticism of this experience, not even crickets – without the critical eye of family or “professional” peers. This Stack is entirely new, unattached. No one I know in real life is here. I am anonymous. Free.
My pals on the road called me Sunshine for a while. I have a naturally optimistic, problem-solving approach to life. I hated that name. Generic hippie garbage. It doesn’t fit my slouching posture. Then, a rowdy bunch started calling me Girl Scout. It was intended to mock my efforts at doing homelessness well. It stuck! I love it! When you see old mentions of “Sunshine,” that was me before my real name found me.
What next? I dunno. I have no goals. I have pretty much done the professional things I have set out to do in life. I’ve written for a major news organization, braved the wilds of Alaska for four years, lived abroad for two, even owned a food truck. Fuck. What’s a person to do now?
It seems be a swell time to re-share my two least read pieces. You could probably call them realistic fictions that might plop you into a moment of empathic understanding.
These were both triggered by writing prompts meeting word-limit parameters and the like.
Write a story where someone says, “You’ll never be content.”
Martha, the name of an actual Donner Party survivor, took her childhood trauma and went uncommonly wild with it. I’ve thought her life would make for a fine female-lead Western series. Maybe someday!
Martha (original western fiction)
You’d think simply being among the Donner Party’s survivors would be enough to inspire a person to find a quiet little farmhouse in a small community with fertile soil where nothing much happens and a person could put down roots.
Write a story where someone takes something that does not belong to them.
Starla is a US homeless woman. Are her efforts to care for neighbors criminal, or is the system to blame?
Piece of Chicken? (original fiction)
Delve behind the local headlines and hang on for a different perspective.
The Hippie Rest Stop is hosting several unhoused nomads for Feast Day. I’ve decided my bio family can continue to make their assumptions about my digital disappearance and phoneless road trip adventures. I’m probably on drugs. Someday, I’ll inquire as to what, exactly, their assumptions have been and write the stories about what fictional me did.
Most of the people coming aren’t turkey fans, so I decided I’ll bust out a Duck Ragu with hearty sides. Once, I made lamb not realizing my unhoused friends have not had such an opportunity. Maybe duck will be an exotic treat, too?
Creatively, I am still intending to write about how the counsel process of practicing anarchism might look, should you decide to nonorganize locally. I’m also well over 40k words into my novel that will absolutely offend loads of people.
Have you read my first-ever series attempt, Acid Hogs? I am finally free in this life to write what my mind conjures. I am anonymous – finding my freedom voice. The voice that isn’t worried about what the symphony’s board at work might think of people shitting in the woods and taking psychedelics.
Thank you for hanging out with me as I explore this newly harnessed freedom. As I flail about the universe, still a cosmic baby, still choosing to leave my leaky house to discover what the universe will shake out next.
It is my hope for all of you on this feast day that you spend your time with your hearts open. Open when others are shut. Share in our humanity. Share in the desire for community and care.
Share.
